Martin Amis on His Writing Career, the British Literary Scene, and His Father Kingsley (2000)

Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949) is a British novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.



Amis's work centers around the apparent excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirizes through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness." Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to heavily influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.

Amis was born in Swansea, South Wales. His father, Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; his mother, Hilary "Hilly" Bardwell, was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He has an older brother, Philip, and his younger sister, Sally, died in 2000. His parents divorced when he was twelve.

He attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s—including the Bishop Gore School (Swansea Grammar School), and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys—where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising." The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father lectured.

In 1965, at age 15, he played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica.

Fukushima The Nuclear Doomsday

My heart is sickened at the level of radiation that has been released in Japan by Tepco's Fukushima's Daiichi 4 nuclear reactors meltdowns over the past 2 1/2 years. No one knows where all the melted nuclear cores went, but it is speculated, they were liquefied and blown up into the wind streams that are moving across North America. Proof is in the pudding, that no one can be trusted with this technology. It's highly dangerous and volatile. Nuclear energy is not our friend and never will be. Insanity rules the day, because, who in their right mind, would build one of these nuclear reactors to boil water to make electricity? And yet, someone did, the U.S., big energy giant, General Electric (GE) built all the Fukushima nuclear reactors. The Japanese Government, and Tepco, who runs Fukushima Daiichi as well as the U.S. big corporation giant, General Electric, the maker of these nuclear reactors, are responsible for Japan's now nuclear wasteland. They contaminated their entire food supply, their farmlands, their ecosystem, the Pacific Ocean, they've nuked their own people & sacrificed their children for some miserable existence until they finally die of radiation poisoning. What kind of inhuman animals, sacrifice children, so they can make big bucks off dirty, toxic, nuclear energy? Their numbers don't add up! Why? Was if for the nuclear weapons of war; the nuclear bombs or was it for, the nuclear tipped ammo? I hope, this is the end of nuclear energy, once and for all time. Between that and big oil, fracking the planet, the oil mining companies are one in the same, destroying our fresh water supply and contaminating the ground with chemical fracking solutions. Is it really worth it when we have a perfectly good clean, free sources of energy. We have unlimited, free, sunlight to work with, the wind, or thermal energy, passive energy, organic matter engines, and more. So what, these guys don't make obscene profits, we don't need them. Why base our monetary currency on barrels of oil, a dirty, toxic energy when we could easily base it on a clean resource. How about doing the whole world a big service and base it on Food? Now, that's a novel idea. I think it's time to say no, to those who tell us we have to eat or drink contaminated food. They lie, no one, has to eat contaminated food or anything bio engineered. We're organic and need organic food to thrive. It's a no brainer! I think it's high time we change and not wait for them too.

The Crop Circles Phenomena

This show looks at the phenomena of crop circles -- from a 1678 woodcarving of "mowing devils" to the growing occurrences of present day formations both in complexity and number.

A crop circle is a sizable pattern created by the flattening of a crop such as wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rapeseed. Crop circles are also referred to as crop formations because they are not always circular in shape. The documented cases have substantially increased from the 1970s to current times.




Twenty-six countries reported approximately 10,000 crop circles in the last third of the 20th century; 90% of those were located in southern England. Many of the formations appearing in that area are positioned near ancient monuments, such as Stonehenge. According to one study, nearly half of all circles found in the UK in 2003 were located within a 15 km (9.3 miles) radius of Avebury. Archeological remains can cause cropmarks in the fields in the shapes of circles and squares, but they do not appear overnight, and they are always in the same places every year.

Since becoming the focus of widespread media attention in the 1980s, crop circles have become the subject of speculation by various paranormal, ufological, and anomalistic investigators ranging from proposals that they were created by bizarre meteorological phenomena to messages from extraterrestrial beings. Many crop circles have been found near ancient sites such as Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire. They have also been found near mounds of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves, also known as tumuli barrows, or barrows and chalk horses, or trenches dug and filled with rubble made from brighter material than the natural bedrock, often chalk. There has also been speculation that crop circles have a relation to ley lines. Many New Age groups incorporate crop circles into their belief systems.